Pages

Friday, October 23, 2009

Building Sandcastles

I'm working on the next bit of expansion for my sandbox setting.

With the way my current group operates, I realized that a mega-dungeon type campaign just isn't going to cut it. We meet for 3-4 hours once a week, but that's to play board games. We play RPGs maybe once a month at that. Our new 3E game will be on Saturdays, not during board game time, so we can still play Classic once a month or so. But with the time limit involved, and the limited English skills of a few players, having one big site that is the campaign won't work.

I've been working on a bunch of mini-dungeons, all of them around a home town (converted to Classic from an attempted sandbox I tried with 3.5 on RPOL many years ago). I figure that we can start sessions in town, gathering some rumors. Then they can decide which rumor to track down, and then we maybe do a bit of wilderness travel to get there, then play through a mini-dungeon. Seems like it should usually be doable in 3-4 hours.

One of the locations from the original sandbox is called Whitebeard Mountain. I never drew maps or anything for it, but it's a goblin lair. Well, I decided instead of the big multilevel lair I'd originally planned, I'd go with interconnected mini-dungeons. I've got an overall layout of how they interconnect (the side-view map), and the first two of the mini-dungeons drawn. I've also decided on what, more or less, will be in each section (kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, thouls, bugbears, a mixed area, then the 'boss' M-U or Cleric and underlings).

I think I may eventually write it up as an old school module, probably for Labyrinth Lord, or maybe generic. I just wonder if people would be interested, since it may end up very similar to the Caves of Chaos.